Santali: A Language Writes Its Future
Ol Chiki gives Santali a distinctive written form. Its story invites us to think about who gets to read, write and be remembered.
Living languages & memory · Santali · Ol Chiki
A script can make a language visible on a page. The life it records is already there.
Santali, a language of the Munda branch of the Austroasiatic family, has been written in several scripts, including Bengali, Odia, Devanagari and Roman letters. Ol Chiki, developed by Raghunath Murmu in the twentieth century, offers a script created specifically for it. The President of India’s centenary announcement dates its invention to 1925.
These facts complicate a familiar picture of cultural preservation. Here, carrying something forward also involved making something new.
Letters with a world behind them
A historical proposal to encode Ol Chiki describes connections between letter forms, familiar objects and actions. It also names Murmu’s teaching book Ol Cemet, explaining the title through the Santali words for writing and learning.
The detail is revealing. An alphabet needs learners, teachers and things worth reading. Its life depends on people finding uses for it.
Ol Chiki is an alphabet with separate vowel letters. The Unicode Standard now gives it a defined place in digital text. That makes it possible for the same characters to be represented across compatible devices and software. Fonts, keyboards, books and opportunities to learn still matter to the person trying to write.
A language has more than one home
It would be misleading to imagine that Santali began with Ol Chiki, or that everyone who writes it must use one script. The language’s multiple written forms are part of the story, alongside speech and song.
For Bharatiyata, this changes the question we bring to living languages. Alongside asking what can be preserved, we should ask what people want to create: a poem, a schoolbook, a play, a message to a friend.
An archive can keep an old text available. A living literary culture also needs space for new work, disagreement and ordinary use. Its speakers and writers must have room to decide what comes next.
The history of Ol Chiki offers an entrance to that larger world. Listening to Santali authors and reading their work must carry the encounter further.
A language carries memory. Its writers also make futures.
Sources and scope
- The Unicode Standard 17, section 13.10: language, script structure and other scripts used for Santali. Historical demographic figures on that page are not used here as current statistics.
- Revised proposal for encoding Ol Chiki (2002), pp. 6–7: the teaching book, writing/learning terminology and letter-form explanations. This historical proposal is used for those descriptions, not as a current account of community practice.
- President of India, Ol Chiki centenary announcement: the 1925 date and continuing literary activity.
This is an introduction based on published sources. It does not claim interviews with Santali speakers or a field visit.
Continue through living languages and the other Bhāṣā directions.